Megan Blossom
Welcome to my webpage!
I worked for 2 years as a research assistant at the Metcalf Infant Research Lab at Brown University. I completed my undergraduate degree at Brown in 2005 with a major in cognitive neuroscience. I got a couple of years of research experience before heading off to graduate school. I've now started in a graduate program in the Child Language Doctoral Program at the University of Kansas.
Research Interests:
I am interested in how infants acquire language, and what cues they might use to help them acheive this amazing feat!
More specifically, I'm interested in studying whether there are visual cues, such as facial expressions and head movements (or visual prosody) that infants are sensitive to when perceiving continuous speech.
I've also used an eyetracker to figure out what infants are actually looking at and paying attention to when perceiving a talking face.
I've also been involved in some projects looking at:
-the acoustical properties of infant directed speech
-how and when infants use sounds to help them interpret an ambigous audiovisual display of a rolling or bouncing ball
-differences in the phonological development of English and French speaking babies
-how subphonemic variation affects lexical competition in adults
I'm glad to be in a graduate school where I can combine my interests in normal language acquisition with research on disordered language acquisition. I'm interested in early idenfication of language learning disorders, perceptual capabilities of children with language learning disorders, and ways that we can effectively help them to communicate.
When I'm not working, I enjoy dancing, knitting, baking, watching movies, and just hanging out.
Publications:
Blossom, M., & Morgan, J.L. (2006) Does the face say what the mouth says? A study of infants' sensitivity to visual prosody. In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia, & C. Zaller (Eds.) Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press
Soderstrom, M., Blossom, M., Foygel, I., & Morgan, J. L.,(in press). Acoustical cues and grammatical units in speech to two preverbal infants. Journal of Child Language .